If you thought that Microsoft was done with Recall after its catastrophic reveal as the main feature of Copilot+ PCs, you are mistaken.
Microsoft wants to bring it back this October 2024. Good news is that the company plans to introduce it in test builds of the Windows 11 operating system in October. In other words: do not expect the feature to hit stable Windows 11 PCs before 2025 at the earliest.
While Recall may have sounded great on paper and on work-related PCs, users and experts alike expressed concern. Users expressed fears that malware could steal Recall data to know exactly what they did in the past couple of months.
Others did not trust Microsoft to keep the data secure. We suggested to make Recall opt-in, instead of opt-out, to make sure that users knew what they were getting into when enabling it.
Microsoft pulled the Recall feature shortly after its announcement and published information about its future in June. There, Microsoft said that it would make Recall opt-in by default. It also wanted to improve security by enrolling in Windows Hello and other features.
Did they make hard commitments to 100% keep the data local and never use it to spy on you? What does their privacy policy say? Come on dude, we’re talking about microsoft. You’re more likely to receive millions from a nigerian prince than to get some privacy from them.
A Google search later: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/privacy-and-control-over-your-recall-experience-d404f672-7647-41e5-886c-a3c59680af15
All local. Nothing sent. You can choose to not believe it, but it’s deceptive to imply they don’t say it’s local.
If you don’t believe them it’s one thing but they said what they said.
Well you don’t know that, they’re telling you that. First issue.
The second is that it can and will change in time.
That’s better than I thought. For the moment.
It only mentions the snapshot storage and processing. It’s a perfect solution for them. The AI will crunch the data and report only it’s findings to Microsoft for advertising purposes. They save on storage and electricity by offloading the data harvesting to your machine.
I see, they don’t state anywhere that the results of the screenshot analysis are never transmitted to them.